An integrated 12.5-Gb/s optoelectronic receiver with a silicon avalanche photodetector in standard SiGe BiCMOS technology

An optoelectronic integrated circuit (OEIC) receiver is realized with standard 0.25-μm SiGe BiCMOS technology for 850-nm optical interconnect applications. The OEIC receiver consists of a Si avalanche photodetector, a transimpedance amplifier with a DC-balanced buffer, a tunable equalizer, and a limiting amplifier. The fabricated OEIC receiver successfully detects 12.5-Gb/s 2³¹-1 pseudorandom bit sequence optical data with the bit-error rate less than 10^-12 at incident optical power of -7 dBm. The OEIC core has 1000 μm × 280 μm chip area, and consumes 59 mW from 2.5-V supply. To the best of our knowledge, this OEIC receiver achieves the highest data rate with the smallest sensitivity as well as the best power efficiency among integrated OEIC receivers fabricated with standard Si technology.